At one point, they stopped at a small village. Mr. Fay warned his group not to drink the water because of the risk of disease.
MIKE FAY: "And sure enough, one of the Pygmies gets hepatitis like probably two or three weeks later. And the first reaction of those guys to something like that is to scarify them with razor blades and bleed them, you know, to get the bad blood out. And so here you've got this highly infectious guy, who all of a sudden everybody's touching his blood, and I just had these nightmares of the whole crew getting hepatitis."
He says it took about a week to carry the sick man to a river. Then they used a dugout canoe to transport him to safety.
STEVE EMBER: Mr. Fay documented his experiences on the MegaTransect. He used a satellite-based positioning system, digital cameras and a laptop computer. He and his guides cut through dense vegetation and crossed rivers and deep, muddy swamps. Along the way, they saw elephants, aardvarks, gorillas and other wildlife. They also saw roads and machinery that logging companies were using to remove trees.
MIKE FAY: "It was hard. But we didn't lose a single person, and it was an expedition of a lifetime, for sure."
The knowledge that came out of the trip, and the attention it received, helped lead Gabon to create thirteen national parks. These placed more than four million hectares of forest under protection.
Mr. Fay moved to Washington to write his findings after he finished the MegaTransect in two thousand. But he says he had a difficult time re-entering city life after sleeping outdoors in the forest for so long.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25